With the exponential growth trend of storage unit capacities, file system sizes are growing exponentially larger as well. Since a file system backup utility must traverse the entire file system in order to locate and back up all required files and directories, large file systems can take a significant amount of time to backup. Longer backup times can also mean a greater risk of interruptions during the backup process. For example, a brief network failure in a networked backup system or any other failure in a client or a server can cause the backup process to be interrupted. In the event of a backup failure, a typical backup system restarts the backup process from the beginning of a set of data being backed up in a backup operation (e.g., a grouping of files and/or directories to be backed up), sometimes referred to herein as a “saveset”. Given the long backup durations and the possibility of further interruptions, starting a backup process over after every interruption can significantly affect the performance of a backup system.
In a typical backup system or process, a backup operation cannot pick up where it left off even if the data comprising the saveset had not been modified since the interruption because in at least some cases the traversal of a file system is not guaranteed to occur in the same order each time. For example, a “readdir” (read directory) command to read entries from a given directory can return results in a different order for separate instances of the same command. Therefore, there exists a need to guarantee data traversal will be performed in a repeatable manner.